Home > Obama's EPA Regulations: 6,552x As Long As Constitution; 46x As Long As Bible

Obama's EPA Regulations: 6,552x As Long As Constitution; 46x As Long As Bible

(CNSNews.com)-- Since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued 3,373 new final regulations, equaling 29,770 pages in the Federal Register and totaling approximately 29,770,000 words, according to a count of the regulations published in the Federal Register.

The Gutenberg Bible is only 1,282 pages and 646,128 words. This means the new EPA regulations issued by the Obama Administration contain 23 times as many pages as the Bible and 46 times as many words.

The Federal Register publishes documents, including proposed rules, notices, interim rules, corrections, drafts of final rules and final rules. The CNSNews.com tabulation included only final rules from the EPA.

CNSNews.com found 3,373 distinct rules published by the EPA since January 20, 2009 covering greenhouse gases, air quality, emissions and hazardous substances, to name a few.

To give an example, on Jan. 13, 2015 the EPA released a final rule entitled, “Definition of Solid Waste,” which totaled 122 pages and was issued to revise “recycling-related provisions associated with the definition of solid waste used to determine hazardous waste regulation.”

The EPA regulations have more than double the number of words of the Obamacare regulations, which have 11,588,500 words and are 78 times as many words as the Obamacare law itself, which contains 381,517 words.

Over the course of Obama’s presidency, the EPA has greatly expanded its regulatory overreach. In President Obama’s first year in office in 2009, the EPA issued 365 regulations, averaging one rule per day. In 2010, the EPA issued 454 regulations and in 2011, the EPA issued 557 regulations.

The number of rules issued during the Obama years peaked in 2012 with 646 final rules issued--76.9 percent more than issued in Obama’s first year. In 2013, the EPA issued 548 regulations and in 2014 the EPA issued 564 regulations.

So far, in 2015, the EPA has issued 241 regulations.

The EPA has issued 3,373 regulations over the 1,665 business days since President Obama took office. This means that the EPA has issued an average of about 2 regulations per work day, Monday through Friday, during Obama's presidency.

There have been 2,329 calendar days since Obama has taken office, meaning the EPA has issued an average of about 1.45 regulations per calendar day.

To get an approximate word count for the EPA rules in the Federal Register, CNSNews.com evaluated a few random rules from the 3,373 EPA regulations published since Obama took office. In these rules, as published in the Federal Register, each page averaged approximately 1,000 words. From this, CNSNews.com calculated that the 29,770 pages in the 3,373 new final EPA rules issued during the Obama administration equal 29,770,000 words.

This is only an approximation because some pages in the Federal Register carry more words than others, and some regulations end in the beginning or middle of a page. For example, one of the regulations was five-pages long and totaled 5,586 words, an average of 1,117 words per page.